Years after accident, man still beating odds

Published: Sunday, March 24, 2013 at 12:30 a.m.

Last Modified: Friday, March 22, 2013 at 4:19 p.m.

Chad Porter's right leg bothers him sometimes. An old injury causes a bit of a hitch in his stride.

But when he wakeboards in the Intracoastal Waterway or plays volleyball at Capt'n Bill's, he hardly thinks about that right leg. It was mangled by a boat propeller after a ski show when he was 15 years old. It was sliced and broken and barely salvageable. It was eventually repaired by screws and skin grafts in a barrage of surgeries.

His lateral motion is limited, but Porter has dealt with it for so long that he barely thinks about.

He thinks even less about his left leg. It required just one surgery – a clean cut on his shin bone, to secure the prosthesis.

The accident

At 15 years old, Chad Porter stood 6-foot-3. He was an Eagle Scout, MVP of his ninth-grade football team and president of his class. He dreamed of becoming a professional athlete and was looking forward to playing tight end at Lumberton High School. But that was still a couple months away. His parents were educators, and the family spent their summers at White Lake, where he skied on the Ski Heels stunt team.

On June 23, 1991, the Ski Heels performed a show for more than 300 people at Tucker Lake, just off Interstate 40 not far from Raleigh.

Porter and his teenage teammates skied barefoot, performed 360s, jumped ramps and built a pyramid on skis with five boys at the bottom and four girls on their shoulders. Porter had put on a gorilla suit and skied across the lake after a girl in a comedic chase scene.

With a storm moving in from the south, the team was moving quickly to put away the skis and all of the lines that tethered them to the boat. Porter and his friend, Michael Pittman, were wading to shore behind the boat, a powerful Ski Nautique. Somehow, the boat was thrust into reverse, going from idle to full-throttle instantaneously, and Porter was directly behind the boat.

With his back to the Ski Nautique, he had only a split-second to make the decision that would change his life. His instinct was to dive under the boat, and there was no time to think it through. Today, he doesn't think it was the right thing to do, but he's not sure there was a right thing to do. A powerful boat was bearing down on him, and he had nowhere to go.

Porter's legs got sucked into the propeller and he could feel his legs being thrashed around. He felt no pain at the time.

The boat hit a docked boat, and one of the adults scrambled to his feet and shut off the engine. The remaining spectators and Porter's teammates couldn't tell what was going on under the boat. All they knew was that Porter hadn't surfaced.

After a few tense seconds, Porter pulled his torso out from under the boat, and Pittman smiled.

"I was thinking, ‘Wow, this is great. Chad survived. He's perfect. He's not even hurt,' Then I pulled him up and lifted his legs up. There were no legs there," said Pittman, who was 18 at the time.

"He starts to lift me out of the water, and my right leg comes out of the water," Porter said. "There was two inches of bone sticking out of the leg. Blood was spraying two feet up in air. The water was getting red all the way around me."

Pittman, his smile erased, lowered Porter back into the water to avoid exposing the spectators and teammates to the gory sight. He pulled Porter over to the floating dock. People ran toward them to help; some saw the carnage, stopped and backed away.

As adults worked on him, Porter's pain was no longer muted by adrenaline or nervous shock. Every twist, every turn, every touch sent searing pain through Porter's legs.

Still, he didn't know how badly he was injured.

The trauma

Porter's memories of the next minutes are vivid.

On shore, he saw his friends on their hands and knees bawling. He heard somebody mention a tourniquet. Pittman said it was his mother, using her belt. From his Eagle Scout training, Porter knew that signaled a serious injury. He heard somebody ask for a mask and snorkel and he wondered, "What in the world could they be interested in right now besides me?"

That's when he found out that he had lost his left foot.

He remembers more fragments of the story. On the way to Johnston County Medical Center, one paramedic asked another what was in the bag he was holding. "These are just some of the body parts that they found," he responded. Porter remembers being wheeled past his parents at the hospital. Just as they arrived with a police escort from White Lake, he was being taken to a helicopter. They shouted "I love you" at him, but the gurney didn't slow down.

He remembers getting to the helicopter and the medical team discovering that he wasn't going to fit into the smaller helicopter. Judging from the amount of blood Porter was losing, the flight nurse assessed the situation as life-or-death. She came up with a plan to turn the board on its side and she delivered the message to Porter.

"You don't have to worry," he joked. "If I fall off the stretcher, I'm not going to run away."

She laughed and she cried, and she got him in the helicopter.

At Duke University Medical Center, Porter was given a 25 percent chance to live, he said. The chances of saving his right leg were 15 percent.

The recovery

Porter's right leg was reassembled and every other day and he endured an excruciating debridement, where medical staff removed the dead, damaged and infected tissue. An external fixator was placed over his leg to hold it together and skin was grafted from his hip to cover the open wound.

For the three and a half weeks he was at Duke, Porter was never alone. An assembly line of family, friends and total strangers visited him. Family members signed up to spend the night in the hospital room with him. He got letters and cards from athletes, coaches and politicians.

Through it all, he never had time for introspection. To ponder his fate. To ask the obvious question: Why me?

He felt obligated to be OK because he wanted those who loved him to be OK with his injury.

At the same time, Pittman was asking the same question: Why him?

Pittman had already decided he wasn't going to pursue soccer in college. He had lived out his school sports dreams.

"I was thinking his whole life was ruined," said Pittman, now the owner of the Beach House Bar & Grill in Ogden. "I felt like – being two or three years older – it should have happened to me."

Pittman visited Porter in the hospital, but his family left White Lake for a few weeks. The whirr of a Ski Nautique engine at a distinct RPM sent a chill through Pittman's body and gruesome images through his brain. He couldn't escape the sound at the lake.

A question, an answer

One day, a therapist came in to counsel Porter. She showed him a video of amputees playing sports.

"This was supposed to be the day to enlighten me and brighten me and kind of show me that life goes on … I watched them and to me they looked like they had one leg and they played like I imagined someone with one leg – hopping, limping, not jumping hardly. In my mind, I said if they videoed these guys, they must be as good as they can be. They must be the best of the best and if I'm lucky, I'll be as good as them."

The grim reality blindsided Porter.

"I told her to shut it off. I told her to leave. I told everybody to get out of the room," Porter said. It was an uncharacteristic display of emotion, one that had been long overdue.

Nobody had signed up to spend that night in his room. For the first time since the accident, Chad Porter cried openly.

"That night I laid in the bed and was devastated," he said. "I finally had the opportunity to be alone and to cry and think it all through. Why me? I've never done anything wrong. Why is this happening to me?"

Amid the despair, a peace came over him.

He won't say it was the voice of God. He'll only say that he heard the words in his mind: "Don't worry about it. You'll find out."

From that day, Porter was determined to make his own video showing what an amputee could do.

But first, he had to walk.

After some recuperation time at home, Porter returned to Duke to learn to walk. A two and a half week program took him eight days.

"This was not going to define me," he said. "There were two choices I had to make, and they were pretty simple choices. I could feel sorry for myself and have an excuse for the rest of my life to not do anything. I could sit on the couch and get fat and nobody will judge me for that. That's the easy choice … Or get back to where you were. Try to make that new video."

With a prosthesis on his left leg and his right leg in a cast to his hip, Porter took the first steps to recovery.

"The most overwhelming sense of pride I ever felt was when I saw him take his first step," said Pam Porter, Chad's mom.

Forward steps

He walked, he ran, he jumped. Not in a matter of days. But gradually he strengthened his right leg and found the balance on his left.

He never got to realize his dream of playing high school football. Again, it was the right leg that hindered him. With limited lateral movement, he would have put himself in jeopardy of another serious injury if a cleat were to get stuck in the sod.

Pam Porter said she was overcome with sorrow during the first weeks of football practice. Her son would go to practice to be near his friends, even though he couldn't participate.

"I told Chad, ‘I just want you to know it's OK to be angry, to be sad. It's OK to cry,'" she said. "Without blinking, he asked, ‘Is it OK if I'm not?'"

Unable to pursue his dream of playing college and professional football, he joined the golf team. Then he played rec league basketball.

The next year, he played high school basketball. Porter wore high socks and a knee brace to cover his prosthesis. Some opponents knew he had a prosthesis; others didn't. One night, in the middle of a game, his prosthesis snapped, the first of seven that he's broken. He hobbled to the bench, his leg dangling and swinging unnaturally in circles. To him, it was frustrating. To his coach, it was a little bit funny. To the spectators who didn't know that the break was metal and not bone, it was horrific.

When he returned to water skiing, his leg fell off with each fall. He'd make a joke and get back up.

In college at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, he played intramural sports against able-bodied athletes. One day, Porter's team matched up against Tim Reaves' team in an intramural basketball game at Hanover Hall. A doctor had convinced Porter to make the liberating decision to stop concealing his prosthesis. So Reaves saw the metal leg and volunteered to guard Porter. On the first possession, Porter received a pass.

On the first possession, Porter caught a pass and blew past Reaves for a dunk.

"I was amazed and inspired," said Reaves, now the pastor at Pine Valley United Methodist Church.

The talks

When Porter was in high school, he told his story to groups of scouts or students. He even told his story at a medical convention.

During college, he became consumed with other pursuits. For a while he worked as a physical therapist, and he would infrequently reveal his prosthesis to help motivate a client. Now he has his own financial planning company, the Porter Financial Group, and he has re-asserted himself as a public speaker.

He spoke to a small group at Reaves' church, then he spoke to the entire congregation. He has spoken at several schools and to various scout groups from New Hanover to Bladen County. Last week, he spoke to seventh graders at Myrtle Grove Middle School. He told his story in third person and asked the students if they wanted to meet the person who had overcome all that adversity. He sent a student to open the gym door. While the students looked anxiously toward the door, Porter removed his left pants leg, revealing his prosthesis. When the student at the door turned around, he saw that Porter had removed his left pants leg, revealing his prosthesis.

"Oh my gosh, it's you!" the student said, completely surprised.

Porter's delivery is one of courage and determination. Another message Porter relates to the children – and adults – is that it's better to ask a question than to stare and wonder. Ask if the person minds talking about the disability, Porter suggests. Some do, and they'll say so. He doesn't mind.

Pittman used to wish that he had been the boy trapped under the boat – that he should have suffered Porter's injuries.

But like Porter, he has since discovered some clarity. He knows that Porter can be an inspiration to others.

"I thought his whole life had been demolished," Pittman said. "But no. That's what God does. He just sends people down that path."

<p>Chad Porter's right leg bothers him sometimes. An old injury causes a bit of a hitch in his stride.</p><p>But when he wakeboards in the Intracoastal Waterway or plays volleyball at Capt'n Bill's, he hardly thinks about that right leg. It was mangled by a boat propeller after a ski show when he was 15 years old. It was sliced and broken and barely salvageable. It was eventually repaired by screws and skin grafts in a barrage of surgeries.</p><p>His lateral motion is limited, but Porter has dealt with it for so long that he barely thinks about.</p><p>He thinks even less about his left leg. It required just one surgery – a clean cut on his shin bone, to secure the prosthesis.</p><p><b>The accident</b></p><p>At 15 years old, Chad Porter stood 6-foot-3. He was an Eagle Scout, MVP of his ninth-grade football team and president of his class. He dreamed of becoming a professional athlete and was looking forward to playing tight end at Lumberton High School. But that was still a couple months away. His parents were educators, and the family spent their summers at White Lake, where he skied on the Ski Heels stunt team.</p><p>On June 23, 1991, the Ski Heels performed a show for more than 300 people at Tucker Lake, just off Interstate 40 not far from Raleigh.</p><p>Porter and his teenage teammates skied barefoot, performed 360s, jumped ramps and built a pyramid on skis with five boys at the bottom and four girls on their shoulders. Porter had put on a gorilla suit and skied across the lake after a girl in a comedic chase scene.</p><p>With a storm moving in from the south, the team was moving quickly to put away the skis and all of the lines that tethered them to the boat. Porter and his friend, Michael Pittman, were wading to shore behind the boat, a powerful Ski Nautique. Somehow, the boat was thrust into reverse, going from idle to full-throttle instantaneously, and Porter was directly behind the boat.</p><p>With his back to the Ski Nautique, he had only a split-second to make the decision that would change his life. His instinct was to dive under the boat, and there was no time to think it through. Today, he doesn't think it was the right thing to do, but he's not sure there was a right thing to do. A powerful boat was bearing down on him, and he had nowhere to go. </p><p>Porter's legs got sucked into the propeller and he could feel his legs being thrashed around. He felt no pain at the time.</p><p>The boat hit a docked boat, and one of the adults scrambled to his feet and shut off the engine. The remaining spectators and Porter's teammates couldn't tell what was going on under the boat. All they knew was that Porter hadn't surfaced.</p><p>After a few tense seconds, Porter pulled his torso out from under the boat, and Pittman smiled.</p><p>"I was thinking, 'Wow, this is great. Chad survived. He's perfect. He's not even hurt,' Then I pulled him up and lifted his legs up. There were no legs there," said Pittman, who was 18 at the time.</p><p>"He starts to lift me out of the water, and my right leg comes out of the water," Porter said. "There was two inches of bone sticking out of the leg. Blood was spraying two feet up in air. The water was getting red all the way around me."</p><p>Pittman, his smile erased, lowered Porter back into the water to avoid exposing the spectators and teammates to the gory sight. He pulled Porter over to the floating dock. People ran toward them to help; some saw the carnage, stopped and backed away.</p><p>As adults worked on him, Porter's pain was no longer muted by adrenaline or nervous shock. Every twist, every turn, every touch sent searing pain through Porter's legs.</p><p>Still, he didn't know how badly he was injured.</p><p><b>The trauma</b></p><p>Porter's memories of the next minutes are vivid.</p><p>On shore, he saw his friends on their hands and knees bawling. He heard somebody mention a tourniquet. Pittman said it was his mother, using her belt. From his Eagle Scout training, Porter knew that signaled a serious injury. He heard somebody ask for a mask and snorkel and he wondered, "What in the world could they be interested in right now besides me?"</p><p>That's when he found out that he had lost his left foot.</p><p>He remembers more fragments of the story. On the way to Johnston County Medical Center, one paramedic asked another what was in the bag he was holding. "These are just some of the body parts that they found," he responded. Porter remembers being wheeled past his parents at the hospital. Just as they arrived with a police escort from White Lake, he was being taken to a helicopter. They shouted "I love you" at him, but the gurney didn't slow down. </p><p>He remembers getting to the helicopter and the medical team discovering that he wasn't going to fit into the smaller helicopter. Judging from the amount of blood Porter was losing, the flight nurse assessed the situation as life-or-death. She came up with a plan to turn the board on its side and she delivered the message to Porter.</p><p>"You don't have to worry," he joked. "If I fall off the stretcher, I'm not going to run away."</p><p>She laughed and she cried, and she got him in the helicopter. </p><p>At Duke University Medical Center, Porter was given a 25 percent chance to live, he said. The chances of saving his right leg were 15 percent.</p><p><b>The recovery</b></p><p>Porter's right leg was reassembled and every other day and he endured an excruciating debridement, where medical staff removed the dead, damaged and infected tissue. An external fixator was placed over his leg to hold it together and skin was grafted from his hip to cover the open wound.</p><p>For the three and a half weeks he was at Duke, Porter was never alone. An assembly line of family, friends and total strangers visited him. Family members signed up to spend the night in the hospital room with him. He got letters and cards from athletes, coaches and politicians.</p><p>Through it all, he never had time for introspection. To ponder his fate. To ask the obvious question: Why me?</p><p>He felt obligated to be OK because he wanted those who loved him to be OK with his injury.</p><p>At the same time, Pittman was asking the same question: Why him?</p><p>Pittman had already decided he wasn't going to pursue soccer in college. He had lived out his school sports dreams.</p><p>"I was thinking his whole life was ruined," said Pittman, now the owner of the Beach House Bar & Grill in Ogden. "I felt like – being two or three years older – it should have happened to me."</p><p>Pittman visited Porter in the hospital, but his family left White Lake for a few weeks. The whirr of a Ski Nautique engine at a distinct RPM sent a chill through Pittman's body and gruesome images through his brain. He couldn't escape the sound at the lake.</p><p><b>A question, an answer</b></p><p>One day, a therapist came in to counsel Porter. She showed him a video of amputees playing sports.</p><p>"This was supposed to be the day to enlighten me and brighten me and kind of show me that life goes on … I watched them and to me they looked like they had one leg and they played like I imagined someone with one leg – hopping, limping, not jumping hardly. In my mind, I said if they videoed these guys, they must be as good as they can be. They must be the best of the best and if I'm lucky, I'll be as good as them."</p><p>The grim reality blindsided Porter.</p><p>"I told her to shut it off. I told her to leave. I told everybody to get out of the room," Porter said. It was an uncharacteristic display of emotion, one that had been long overdue.</p><p>Nobody had signed up to spend that night in his room. For the first time since the accident, Chad Porter cried openly.</p><p>"That night I laid in the bed and was devastated," he said. "I finally had the opportunity to be alone and to cry and think it all through. Why me? I've never done anything wrong. Why is this happening to me?" </p><p>Amid the despair, a peace came over him. </p><p>He won't say it was the voice of God. He'll only say that he heard the words in his mind: "Don't worry about it. You'll find out."</p><p>From that day, Porter was determined to make his own video showing what an amputee could do.</p><p>But first, he had to walk.</p><p>After some recuperation time at home, Porter returned to Duke to learn to walk. A two and a half week program took him eight days.</p><p>"This was not going to define me," he said. "There were two choices I had to make, and they were pretty simple choices. I could feel sorry for myself and have an excuse for the rest of my life to not do anything. I could sit on the couch and get fat and nobody will judge me for that. That's the easy choice … Or get back to where you were. Try to make that new video." </p><p>With a prosthesis on his left leg and his right leg in a cast to his hip, Porter took the first steps to recovery. </p><p>"The most overwhelming sense of pride I ever felt was when I saw him take his first step," said Pam Porter, Chad's mom.</p><p><b>Forward steps</b></p><p>He walked, he ran, he jumped. Not in a matter of days. But gradually he strengthened his right leg and found the balance on his left.</p><p>He never got to realize his dream of playing high school football. Again, it was the right leg that hindered him. With limited lateral movement, he would have put himself in jeopardy of another serious injury if a cleat were to get stuck in the sod. </p><p>Pam Porter said she was overcome with sorrow during the first weeks of football practice. Her son would go to practice to be near his friends, even though he couldn't participate.</p><p>"I told Chad, 'I just want you to know it's OK to be angry, to be sad. It's OK to cry,'" she said. "Without blinking, he asked, 'Is it OK if I'm not?'"</p><p>Unable to pursue his dream of playing college and professional football, he joined the golf team. Then he played rec league basketball. </p><p>The next year, he played high school basketball. Porter wore high socks and a knee brace to cover his prosthesis. Some opponents knew he had a prosthesis; others didn't. One night, in the middle of a game, his prosthesis snapped, the first of seven that he's broken. He hobbled to the bench, his leg dangling and swinging unnaturally in circles. To him, it was frustrating. To his coach, it was a little bit funny. To the spectators who didn't know that the break was metal and not bone, it was horrific.</p><p>When he returned to water skiing, his leg fell off with each fall. He'd make a joke and get back up.</p><p>In college at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, he played intramural sports against able-bodied athletes. One day, Porter's team matched up against Tim Reaves' team in an intramural basketball game at Hanover Hall. A doctor had convinced Porter to make the liberating decision to stop concealing his prosthesis. So Reaves saw the metal leg and volunteered to guard Porter. On the first possession, Porter received a pass.</p><p>On the first possession, Porter caught a pass and blew past Reaves for a dunk.</p><p>"I was amazed and inspired," said Reaves, now the pastor at Pine Valley United Methodist Church. </p><p><b>The talks</b></p><p>When Porter was in high school, he told his story to groups of scouts or students. He even told his story at a medical convention.</p><p>During college, he became consumed with other pursuits. For a while he worked as a physical therapist, and he would infrequently reveal his prosthesis to help motivate a client. Now he has his own financial planning company, the Porter Financial Group, and he has re-asserted himself as a public speaker. </p><p>He spoke to a small group at Reaves' church, then he spoke to the entire congregation. He has spoken at several schools and to various scout groups from New Hanover to Bladen County. Last week, he spoke to seventh graders at Myrtle Grove Middle School. He told his story in third person and asked the students if they wanted to meet the person who had overcome all that adversity. He sent a student to open the gym door. While the students looked anxiously toward the door, Porter removed his left pants leg, revealing his prosthesis. When the student at the door turned around, he saw that Porter had removed his left pants leg, revealing his prosthesis. </p><p>"Oh my gosh, it's you!" the student said, completely surprised.</p><p>Porter's delivery is one of courage and determination. Another message Porter relates to the children – and adults – is that it's better to ask a question than to stare and wonder. Ask if the person minds talking about the disability, Porter suggests. Some do, and they'll say so. He doesn't mind. </p><p>Pittman used to wish that he had been the boy trapped under the boat – that he should have suffered Porter's injuries.</p><p>But like Porter, he has since discovered some clarity. He knows that Porter can be an inspiration to others. </p><p>"I thought his whole life had been demolished," Pittman said. "But no. That's what God does. He just sends people down that path."</p><p><a href="http://www.starnewsonline.com/section/topic87"><b>Mike Voorheis</b></a>: 343-2205</p>